13-12-09 Thick
Ah well, the end of a rare make-a-date TV series, The Thick Of It, last night. I’ve followed this series and then caught it again, and again, on iPlayer. The closing titles rolled just in time to switch over and see In The Loop get its Comedy Award on ITV with a gracious spritz of vinegar from Armando Ianucci.
Almost three decades separate TTOI from Yes, Minister and what a contrast-and-compare gift they make to social historians.
Yes, Minister scripts were in direct line from Sheridan’s comedy of manners. A lot of the humour derived from turning Socratic dialogue on its head: Sir Humphrey Appleby’s patrician circumlocutory animadversions regarding the advisability, or contrariwise, contra-indications in respect of proposed or mooted policy trends vs. Jim Hacker’s efforts to reduce the mandarin elaborations to plain English, preferably yes or no.
To use Sir Robin Day’s phrase, Hacker was a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ figurehead temporarily bolted to the ship of State, navigated by a presiding establishment Civil Service. Writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn were briefed by Westminster insiders and while the apparently subversive exposure of the political power-base seemed irreverent at the time, that iconoclastic comedienne Margaret Thatcher effectively spiked its guns by hijacking Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne for her own excruciating sketch (written ‘with’ press-secretary Sir Bernard Ingham) for The National Viewers and Listeners Awards in 1984.
Where Yes, Minister pictured the bland bullying intransigence of a conservative ruling elite, the Thick Of It reflects what J G Ballard described as ‘politics as a branch of advertising’. Thatcher’s steady hand on the status quo is replaced by a post-Blair obsession with media perception-management at the heart of politics.
Where Sir Humphrey was a Medici Cardinal with Bernard Woolley as his nuncio, Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker is a cadaverous spitball husk animated by undiluted Nietzschian will to power. Tucker is a fanatic in George Santayana’s sense: one who redoubles his efforts when he’s forgotten his original goal. His fierce focus performs handbrake turns at the bleep of his mobile phone.
Where Sir Humphrey wrapped puzzles in elegant enigma, Tucker chews lumps out of his lackeys to ensure that the flesh-grinding machinery runs tickety-fuckety-boo. There’s no point in trying to review TTOI under cover of ‘the f-word’ euphemism; the fucking fuck-rate of the script elevates the phoneme to a rich vocabulary of its own. Sir Humphrey used sheer weight of eloquence to lean on his minister; Tucker fires off harpoons to maim and eviscerate.
You don’t mind too much because there isn’t a single character without irritating flaws. The Office featured handheld camerawork and included Tim and Dawn as everyman anchors; TTOI’s camerawork is more erratic and offers no respite from the humid air of simmering chaos. Ianucci’s script is semi-improvised like Mike Leigh’s but where the latter’s plays slowly reveal layers of his characters’ inadequacies and weakness, the Ianucci method skins them alive.
In 6/8 of the current series, Tucker shared a moment of incipient breakdown with Terri Coverley but wound up enough rage to pull himself round. The cliff-hanger at half-time in the final two-parter was Tucker’s sacking – including the formal handover of his iconic mobile phone – though in the final part he returns as an ‘adviser’ and appears to be a Tigger unbounced, if you recast Tigger as a hyena.
There was never a moment’s doubt that this couldn’t last and the revelation in the episode was how much you wanted the full feral fury to reassert itself, which little by little it surely did. In parallel, his counterpart in the Opposition camp, Cal ‘The Fucker’ Richards (Tom Hollander, previously the hapless minister Simon Foster in In The Loop) ousts adman manqué Stewart Pearson to steer a looming election campaign.
The set-up for series 4 promises more fucking vitriol-flinging and Darwinist struggle more usually seen on wildlife documentaries about the plains of the Serengheti.
Armando iannucci’s comedy traces a line of descent that takes in Swift, Hogarth and Alfred Jarry. It’s scatalogical and unsparing and at its core its morality hammers into its targets with a cold chisel.
Might you surmise that I’m salivating a little at the prospect of Series 4? Oh Yes, Minister.